Discredited Hysterics

When Medicare was being considered, the American Medical Association hired Ronald Reagan to record a record housewives could play for their friends. It was called Operation: Coffee Cup, and you can listen to it in the clip atop this post, or read the text here.

Reagan was a more graceful speaker than Blackburn, but his point was much the same. Kill the bill. “If you don’t do this and if I don’t do it,” he said, “one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”

Well, the bill passed. And moments ago, Rep. Paul Ryan was on the floor of the House, bellowing against Democrats who would dare propose “across-the-board cuts to Medicare.” This is breathless opportunism from Ryan — he has proposed far deeper across-the-board cuts to Medicare, and is making arguments against the Democrats’ bill that would be far more potent and accurate if aimed at his own — but leave that aside for a moment. The GOP’s embrace of the program that Ronald Reagan fought, and that Newt Gingrich sought to let “whither on the vine,” is based on the lived experience seniors have had with the bill: It has made them more, rather than less, free.

Blackburn’s introduction aside, people do not “celebrate” the freedom to not be able to afford lifesaving medical care. They don’t want the freedom to weigh whether to pay rent or take their feverish child to the emergency room. They don’t like the freedom to lose their job and then be told by insurers that they’re ineligible for coverage because they were born with a heart arrhythmia.

When faced with the passage of programs that would deliver people from these awful circumstances, the Republicans adopt a very narrow and cruel definition of the word “freedom.” But when faced with the existence of programs like Medicare, and the recognition that their constituents depend on those programs to live lives free of unnecessary fear and illness, they abandon their earlier beliefs, forget their dire warnings and, when convenient, defend these government protections aggressively. There’s nothing much to be done about that. It is, after all, a free country. But Americans should feel free to ignore these discredited hysterics.

Comments

@1 It will be interesting to see what effect this vote has on 2010. Democrats shouldn’t be too optimistic yet. Young people will need to vote in as large numbers as they did in 2008, or they will likely still lose seats.

I think there is more potency in the long game, WRT the effect of HCR on political realignment.

I don’t think it would be the end of the world to lose a few seats, and it’s likely to be expected given the cycle just after a prez election. And, if the losses could be concentrated among the assholes like Stupak, then there might be a silver lining.

But, if HCR passes, and is the nucleus for further improvement in access and equitabilty in health care, then this could really slam the “Prefers GOP” party. That worries me a bit though, as it seems clear that they’re devolving into a wounded, dying rabid animal…and that’s dangerous.

Today, there are a number of people who can’t afford health insurance. After this bill passes, they will get charged a tax penalty and still have no insurance if they still can’t afford it. They would have been better off without the current bill.

@8 Sure, we won’t really know any of this for sure until 2014 – when these rules all take effect.

What I find to be the biggest benefit of passing this bill today, is that in 2014, if we’re in a situation where the costs of health care are still so high that individual mandates are a genuine burden, there’s greater ownership of the problem within the legislature. Up until now, nothing ever got done because no one in government wanted ownership of the problem. With the passage of this bill, that changes.

@10 Republicans say they want a better bill. They had 30 years to enact their own bill. They did nothing, and there’s no reason to believe they ever will. You could wait 1,000 years for Republican health care reform, and 10,000 years later you’d still be waiting. All you’ll ever get out of GOPers is taking away the right of injured patients to sue negligent doctors and hospitals.

Funny how legislation favored by Democrats is so viscously opposed by Republicans at first, until they see how well it works, at which point they embrace it.

The AMA was opposed to Medicare, until they saw how much better they were able to treat the elderly under it’s provisions, and that they were actually better off financially from receiving pay for work they previously had to give away for free to those who couldn’t afford it.

Likewise, once the Republicans figured out that their base consisted primarily of older people, they suddenly embraced Medicare, and claim that anything Democrats do threatens Medicare.

@16 I love the fact that all of my conservative older relatives are griping about the “government take-over of health care” and how this means some faceless bureaucrat in DC is going to dictate what doctors you can see, what treatments you receive, and how long you have to wait to get them. The funny thing is they all have Medicare or VA coverage. They can quit whining about how bad “government run health care” is any time now.

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